The thing is that its not about "worse graphics", we need smarter graphics. Actually putting effort into optimizing graphics instead of being lazy and when it runs like ass, smearing vaseline over it.
Instead of raytracing, you actually design areas with lightning in mind and make really good looking baked in lightnig with basic dynamic lighting, and its gonna end up looking way better because youre not forced to render the whole thing at 480p and upscale it with blurry ai garbage.
Conspiracy Brain: I'm convinced at some point hardware companies hijacked the graphics race and kept it going longer than it needed to, so they could prop up their manufacturing.
We reached a "good enough" state years and years ago.
yeah the new updates always have performance issues but they always get fixed. i remember complaining about how badly fortuna ran on release and getting told to buy a new gpu, then a week later they released an update and it ran perfectly lol
I am glad that steam deck and other portable pcs are jamming a giant wrench into game engines and forcing people to make low-end versions of their games because people are using them
It's like... I can't visually tell the difference between Doom 2016 and remnant 2. But I can tell you one runs at 165+ fps at 4k and the other needs dlss to reach 60 fps at 1080p on an expensive rig.
Even as someone who's spent a lot of money on my setup... I want to actually be able to up my resolution and framerate, that's why I got this monitor. Those mean more to me than Joel's stubble.
I'll be honest. After watching edgerunners, I feel gutted that 2077 doesn't look like that.
I also, really dislike how it's core gameplay is basically just an FPS rpg when the cyberpunk setting lets you have gameplay that looks like... literally anything. But that's besides the point.
Honestly games with supposed "worse" graphics are so much better anyway because there's actually so much more style in the design and makes it much more interesting than just "oooh look, it looks almost like real life"
personally i wouldn't use the term "worse graphics" since that just sounds like it's discrediting one's work on said game, but that's really just my opinion on it.
Seems that Heroine of the Sniper might be that kind of a game. Ridiculously fun FPS with an anime girl that actually feels like its own thing due to unusual inspiration from Material Sniper
I just don't understand the instinct these executives have to spend like 200 million on a single game instead of, like, spending 50 million on 4 games, or 20 million on 10.
Like shouldn't it be MORE risk-averse to DIVERSIFY instead of spending hundreds of millions to make Concord 2?
So weird how the capital G types hated her for saying this even though they all praised 6th gen as being the pinnacle of games, when games were shorter with worse graphics.
I am going to be 100% real with you, realistic graphics are boring and take away from the experience. Like oh yeah so pretty the ray-traced environments are so pretty woah too bad I can only experience it at 5 frames per second because despite having a RTX card it's just that poorly optimized.
Honestly I think no longer having to ship on physical media was a poison pill for the industry. It means almost nothing gets optimized before release, which better suits the model of releasing at barely stable 1.0 builds and day 0 patching, but also makes performance lag and file sizes balloon.
Also, my own axe to grind is getting off the 'season pass' treadmill of having core game content unfinished at release and sold piecemeal to keep the sticker shock down.
I don't need any more open world slogs whose all-in price should have been $120 up front.
Meanwhile, I have thousands of hours on games like Project Zomboid or Minecraft, which look like games that came out 20 years ago but support modern hardware.
Like how much overtime did the team of engineers and artists who worked on the horses for Red Dead Redemption 2 have to burn to get the shrinking working correctly?
That's the shit that N E E D S to stop if the industry's gonna survive.
I absolutely agree, though the little pedant deep inside me always wants to be like "but graphics can be better by being 'worse' and it can catch people on that wording, and also cedes ground that only ultra-fidelity realism-chasing ugly shit is 'good graphics'"
Like DICEOMANCER is all hand-drawn art and it's great, the PS1 pastiches of low-poly models that e.g. b0tster does are angelic! Actually worse graphics are also fine, but it's very possible and arguably Only Possible to make better graphics by stylizing lower fidelity.
What drives me nuts is people believing that we need the system we have to get big games
But so many old games have so many hours worth of play time, we can still have big games but we don't need these multi million dollar fucking projects. Publishers are lying to support their own existence.
Unironically true. How much sex is one giving up to place every rivet on a machine so that the light will "Hit it just right" and make your average gamer who doesn't notice more than shapes feel a bit brain buzzed for two seconds before bitching the the game is woke? Not a good trade..!
Also, functional relationships/fulfillng lives can prevent the dev from becoming a culture warrior themselves, thus producing games that arent unplayable copaganda.
I’m just gonna point to Balatro. One of the best, highest rated games of the year can run on an actual toaster and it’s primarily played with cards. We don’t need super advanced graphics and tech. We just need good fucking games.
Comments
Instead of 3000k ultra hd raytracing, it should be 3000k ultra hd raytracing on a lenovo yoga. THAT will catch my eye
There's the capitalism logic.
We reached a "good enough" state years and years ago.
I also, really dislike how it's core gameplay is basically just an FPS rpg when the cyberpunk setting lets you have gameplay that looks like... literally anything. But that's besides the point.
She's like Jesus, she (got unending amounts of harassment) for our sins.
Like shouldn't it be MORE risk-averse to DIVERSIFY instead of spending hundreds of millions to make Concord 2?
I don't need any more open world slogs whose all-in price should have been $120 up front.
Do I need to answer that question?
Like how much overtime did the team of engineers and artists who worked on the horses for Red Dead Redemption 2 have to burn to get the shrinking working correctly?
That's the shit that N E E D S to stop if the industry's gonna survive.
Devs: Suffering because they give up their lives to make a game that their most notable feature is being popular. then get fired for their trouble.
Publishers:
Like DICEOMANCER is all hand-drawn art and it's great, the PS1 pastiches of low-poly models that e.g. b0tster does are angelic! Actually worse graphics are also fine, but it's very possible and arguably Only Possible to make better graphics by stylizing lower fidelity.
But so many old games have so many hours worth of play time, we can still have big games but we don't need these multi million dollar fucking projects. Publishers are lying to support their own existence.
As it should be.